Assembly doomed equality bills

I am writing to correct the record about the status of the "Women's Equality Act." In your editorial about the Moreland Commission proposals, you note the difficulty of passing omnibus "big-package" legislation, and say, "Think the 10-point Women's Equality Act, in which Republicans claimed to support nine proposals, absent an abortion protection; the legislation remained bundled and nothing was passed into law."

The fact is that the Senate Republican leadership did exactly as you suggested. They didn't wait for agreement on a "big-package" bill. With the governor's agreement, the Senate leadership divided the bill into individual components and the Senate passed every single one of them - except the one that would have expanded abortion.

It is the Assembly leadership, along with abortion rights advocates, who have stopped the enactment of needed reforms for women, by their non-negotiable insistence that only an omnibus bill would even be considered.

It is the Assembly leadership - and only they - who stand in the way of reform with their "all or nothing" stance.